Gaffney: After Tillerson’s Ouster, ‘Next Order of Business Is H.R. McMaster’
by JOHN HAYWARD
BreitBart.com
14 Mar 2018
Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the sacking of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. Gaffney proposed that if President Trump wants more top officials who truly support his policies, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster should be the next to go.
Gaffney said Tillerson’s firing reminded him of the 1982 dismissal of Secretary of State Alexander Haig by President Ronald Reagan.
“He had a similar reason for firing General Haig, then secretary of state: because he had been double-dealing and otherwise insubordinate, occasionally even contemptuously insubordinate, of the president’s policies, specifically with respect at the time to something called the Siberian gas pipeline,” Gaffney recalled.
He described how Haig negotiated the pipeline deal with European powers in defiance of Reagan’s explicit directions, a situation very similar to President Trump’s reported anger at Tillerson for working with European interests to keep the Iran nuclear deal alive.
“I would just say that the Deep State isn’t so much what’s being removed at the moment. It’s kind of the shallow state,” he quipped. “You’re going to have to replace, I believe, both the kinds of people that the Tillerson team brought in – there were some who were White House people that he fought, but most of them in political appointee positions are Tillerson folks – but you’re also going to have to go after the State Department bureaucracy itself.”
“The fact is that the foreign service and the career civil servants there are notoriously hostile to President Trump. At the very least, Mike Pompeo is going to have to have people around him who will help ensure that the various bureaus – the regional bureaus, the key policy shops, including the policy planning staff under a fellow by the name of Brian Hook, it has been really a rogue operation – have to be brought into alignment with the president’s direction,” he recommended.
“If the president really wants to have the full benefit of the housecleaning that he has set in train, he’s going to have to remove as well Rex Tillerson’s enabler – who is, of course, the national security adviser to the president, H.R. McMaster,” Gaffney added.
The Rest…HERE
